The moody blues have a meaning

Photography/ “Drift” by Katherine White and “Dream City Demolition”, paintings and installations, by Katie Hayne, M16 Artspace until June 4. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

WHITE’S artist statement begins: “The work is about the feeling of drifting on waves of uncertainty, with climate change experienced first-hand through bushfires”.

There are 10 works in a connected series.

White expresses her moods through three visual elements: bodies, sea water and sea plants. The technique is cyanotype with masses of broad brush strokes layered with bodies and with sea plants.

Most of the brush strokes are saturated at the centre and have a dry brush scratchy effect at the edges. Some of the images may have had earth elements added to the chemicals giving rise to a tonal effect referred to by White as “a sea grey with ash and burnt debris”.

A strong part of the visual impact is that some brush strokes are horizontal, some are simply large dollops, some are vertical and some form the shape of a whirlpool.

All of the human figures are truncated. Some lack natural proportions. They lack detail. Most are awkward, tangled, edgy, showing unusual angles. The body parts are a flat pale at the centre. Towards the edges the paleness darkens, giving the body shapes a ghostly look.

The directness of the cyanotype camera-less technique, the rough and edgy brush strokes, the variations in the structures of massed brush strokes, the pale bodies, the dense saturation contrasting with the dry brush effects, the large formats, the strong texture of the paper, and the uneven edges of the paper are all deployed to generate considerable emotional power. The visible human touch, rough at the edges, links directly to the artist’s intent.

There is no opportunity to stand back and see the series as a whole. Although curation of the 10 works along a single wall in a corridor makes the time flow seem linear, the works do connect back and forth in time because of White’s consistent use of technical devices which link later emotions to earlier emotions. The works move through various emotional states to White’s final resolution: “…sloughing off winter skin, swimming again in clear sea water”.

The moody and dark Prussian blues here are apt. Variations in the state of the water as a trope for a climate-raddled personal environment is apt. The human swimmer begins all at sea. In the end she swims towards sea plants which are here, perhaps, deployed as a symbol of hope.

White has blended colour expressionism, gestural art and photographic imaging to create a stimulating, technically sustained and well- integrated work.

I left White’s exhibition pondering how artists’ engagement with climate and with weather is evolving. Artists once gloried in painting romantic storms among craggy peaks, wrote odes to seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness and sang in the rain. Weather as an inspiration for creating idyllic art appears largely to have disappeared, often replaced by creativity reflecting uncertainty, anxiety and even fatalism.

That said, there are traces of hope in White’s “Drift 10, 2022” – cleaner water, living sea plants, and a vigorous swimmer.

I dipped briefly into Hayne’s exhibition. I was particularly struck by the way in which “Benjamin Offices 1 – brutal views, 2022” resonates visually with the disrupted forms of war-ravaged buildings such as that in “Portal of a ruined church at Villers-Brettoneux” by Evelyn Chapman. This painting is held at the Australian War Memorial.

Hayne’s exhibition, which also features the Northbourne Flats, addresses the human implications of the ways in which Canberra builds, demolishes and rebuilds itself. As Picasso once said: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction”.